CHULA VISTA 
At a recent First Friday networking breakfast, business and community leaders were treated to a concert that began with Schubert’s “The Trout,” segued into Strauss’ “The Blue Danube,” and concluded with “Clocks” by Coldplay.

The 15 musicians performing the eclectic selections at the San Diego Country Club in Chula Vista were fourth and fifth graders from the Community Opus Project, a partnership forged by the San Diego Youth Symphony and the Chula Vista Elementary School District with the ultimate goal of bringing music instruction back into every classroom.

Like a crescendo in a classical work, the Community Opus Project started slowly and quietly and has grown stronger and louder with each passing year. Begun in 2010 as a free after school program for 65 third graders at Otay and Lauderbach elementary schools, Opus has since expanded to six schools, providing more than 250 third graders with 90 minutes of music instruction a week as part of their curriculum.

For the first time in 15 years, the district is hiring a full-time music teacher who will join the staff at Castle Park Elementary by March 1. The teacher’s salary will be paid in part from funds in the $30 million Promise Neighborhood implementation grant the district received last year from South Bay Community Services. Initially, the cost of music teachers’ salaries will be shared by the district and the individual schools and come from Title I funds.

“This has been a catalyst for change in our district,” Assistant Superintendent John Nelson said. “We talk about innovation and we want to look at learning very differently.

“We are on our way to being innovative in the 21st century around music for all students.”

As Nelson told the First Friday audience, innovation means collaboration. To that end, the district is joining forces with all kinds of groups — in South County and beyond — in a variety of ways.

• The school district has partnered with VH1’s Save the Music foundation. For every full-time music teacher Chula Vista hires for a school, the cable television network will give $30,000 to that school to purchase musical instruments. The district’s goal for 2013-14 is to hire full-time instructors for two to three schools. The district’s multiyear plan with VHI outlines a formula for bringing music back into every school within the next 15 years.

• With an eye toward nurturing its future musical student body, the Sweetwater Union High School District’s Visual and Performing Arts Department has loaned woodwind and brass instruments to the Chula Vista elementary district.

• Seeking hard evidence that music has multiple benefits, the district has formed a partnership with UCSD’s Center for Human Development and the Neurosciences Institute that could provide more definitive, empirical data regarding the program’s influence.

And the kernel of the genesis of the partnership between the youth symphony and the school district? That sprang from the phenomenon known as “it’s who you know.”

Margarita Holguin proved to be the bridge. As executive director of the Chula Vista Community Collaborative that operates family resource centers in the area, she is in regular contact with school administrators. And she knew someone on the board of the youth symphony.

“The San Diego Youth Symphony had the vision that it wanted to get more connected with the community,” Holguin said. “They contacted me and asked, ‘What can we do?’

“I worked with them to identify the schools that could really benefit from something like this. There was a lot of interest and everyone saw this as a very positive and good thing. That’s when it began to grow.”

Holguin has since been invited to join the youth symphony board and continues to work on meeting its vision of making music education accessible to all students.

“We are very much here to enhance collaboration,” said Holguin of her agency. “We take the pulse and see what the needs are of our community, then reach out to partners, making that link between community and providers.”

The Community Opus Project adheres to the El Sistema concept, sometimes called the “Venezuelan miracle” after its country of origin. The music education program has been embraced by dozens of orchestras and educational institutions from Los Angeles to Boston over the past 35 years and is based on a relatively simple proposition: Creating music is a metaphor for creating community, a community that extends far beyond the ensemble.

Recently, more than 1,000 people attended the Community Opus Project’s midyear concert at Castle Park High School. The community gathering — from the engagement of the family to celebrating a child’s success in music — was El Sistema at its finest.

“The gymnasium was wall-to-wall people,” said Dalouge Smith, executive director of the San Diego Youth Symphony. “There were 400 musicians on the floor between the elementary, middle and high school students and another 800 parents and family members in attendance.

“Frankly, I think we scared them a little bit. They were saying, ‘Is this going to get any bigger?’”

Smith said the youth symphony would love for the Opus program to get bigger.

“We are concentrating our work in this community because we believe there is so much potential for the model that we are developing here to have replication in communities across the county and, quite frankly, across the country,” Smith said. “Chula Vista is poised to reteach the United States how to put music back into the schools.”